Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Chayora Limited has begun construction of a 300MW, 32-hectare (80 acre) data center campus in Beichen, Tianjin, China. The facility, which is designed for up to full 2N resilience and redundancy with dedicated substations for a 25MW IT load, will use prefabricated modular data centre design and construction techniques. The first building on the campus is expected to be ready by the end of the end.

The Hong Kong-based data centre infrastructure company said its Tianjin campus, when completely built-out, will comprise six large 3000 rack data centres and three smaller 1000 rack high performance computing facilities.

Later this year, Chayora plans to begin construction of a second, 280MW hyperscale campus in the greater Shanghai region. This data center will be newly-built and designed from the ground up to international standards.

“The continued development of China and its importance to the global economy was underlined by China’s leadership at the 19th National People’s Congress in Beijing in October,” says Oliver Jones, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Chayora. “The creation of world-class technology infrastructure will play a key part in underpinning these goals and Chayora is committed to supporting this achievement.”

Connected2Fiber, a start-up based in Boston, announced $8 million in additional funding for its SaaS platform, which used by B2B connectivity providers to manage and transform market data.

Connected2Fiber purpose-built SaaS platform, The Connected World, that helps B2B connectivity providers engage buyers through the funnel. Its location management platform enables sales and marketing teams to see serviceability and create OnNet and NearNet building lists in the data formats required by their customers and partners, and directly integrates into top procurement tools.

Connected2Fiber cited a number of milestones since entering the market in 2015:

Five of the top 10 largest MSO’s are currently using Connected2Fiber as a component of their go to market strategy.

Connected2Fiber customers have published more than 5,000 automated building lists to convey serviceability to their prospects, partners and customers.

Connected2Fiber covers more than 4 million unique locations connected by its clients’ network, including OnNet, NearNet and OffNet reach.

The new Series A funding came from Ascent Venture Partners, Nauta Capital, NXT Ventures and Osage Venture Partners.

Parvarandeh was formerly the Group President and the first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Maxim Integrated where he spent 27 years building leading-edge technology businesses, helping scale the company from 150 employees, when he joined, to over 8,000 employees and revenues of $2.4 billion when he left.

Monday, January 15, 2018

Deutsche Telekom completed its next wave of FTTC (fiber to the cabinet) and vectoring upgrades. As a result, more than 358,000 households in 207 cities and 122 communities can now connect to the Internet with up to 100 Mbps download and 40 Mbps upload.

"We are the only company pursuing comprehensive broadband expansion," says Tim Höttges, CEO of Deutsche Telekom. "Some of our upgrade projects serve tens of thousands of households, while others serve just a handful. For us, every line counts... No other company is investing as much in broadband expansion in rural areas as Deutsche Telekom."

The next FTTC commissioning wave will take place on February 15. With this upgrade, copper lines running between local exchanges and street cabinets are being replaced with fiber-optic cables. Vectoring is used to increase performance over the remaining copper cable into the home. Later this year, DT is looking to deploy super-vectoring, which could push downstream speeds to 250 Mbps.

Pony.ai, a start-up based in Fremont, California with R&D in Beijing, announced $112 million in venture funding for its autonomous driving solutions.

The Series A funding was co-led by Morningside Venture Capital and Legend Capital. Seed round lead-investor Sequoia China and investor IDG Capital also participated in the round, along with Hongtai Capital, Legend Star, Puhua Capital, Polaris Capital, DCM Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Silicon Valley Future Capital and other funding sources. Miracle Capital was the exclusive financial advisor in this round.

Pony.ai is headed by James Peng, co-founder and CEO, who was previously Chief Architect at Baidu, where he oversaw the technical direction of the autonomous driving division and other key areas such as big data and monetization platforms. Dr. Peng started his career at Google after earning a PhD from Stanford University, and he also holds a BS degree from Tsinghua University. Tiancheng Lou, co-founder and CTO, worked on autonomous driving at both Google X (before it became Waymo) and Baidu. Dr. Lou holds a BS and PhD in Computer Science from Tsinghua University.

Pony.ai said it is also making considerable progress in Guangzhou, China, where it began testing its fleet of autonomous driving vehicles on public roads this past December.

“We are excited and honored to welcome our new group of investors to the team and are grateful for their support!” says co-founder and CEO, James Peng. “Autonomous driving has the potential to bring about massive benefits to society, and we hope to work closely with our outstanding investors to realize this future.” Co-founder and CTO, Tiancheng Lou, adds: “We very much look forward to working with our investors to achieve our mission of bringing the safest and the most reliable autonomous driving technology to market!”

Optus awarded a five-year contract to Nokia to manage and maintain key components of its network infrastructure, operations and field maintenance in Australia. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Under the contract, Nokia and Optus will develop a Network Operations Centre (NOC), building on global best practices and leveraging local talent to deliver higher performance networks.

To improve efficiency, Optus will tap Nokia's Global Delivery Model to streamline its network operations. Nokia will also leverage its extensive global services expertise to help Optus bundle, standardize and automate its processes. Nokia said it will provide network operations and software services, and deploy robotics, artificial intelligence and extreme automation to help Optus standardize and scale its operations, while Nokia Field Services will manage all components of work associated with mobile base station equipment and facilities.

There are renewed signs of strength in several key industry segments, including servers and switches.

You might think that all of the action is concentrated in public clouds and that the only vendors benefitting from this shift are white box vendors from Asia. But that is not what the Q3 2017 data shows. Certainly, the public cloud is growing by leaps and bounds and ODMs from China and Taiwan are shipping in ever greater volume.

However, a few of the top name brand server vendors, especially Dell, IBM and Cisco (to a lesser extent) are finding renewed growth beyond the handful of hyperscale public cloud projects. This seems to indicate that large corporate data centers are entering a refresh cycle. Intel continues to dominate this sector. Demand for x86 servers increased 20.4% in 3Q17 with $15.4 billion in revenues. Non-x86 servers grew 15.1% year over year to $1.5 billion.

IDC finds that vendor revenue in the worldwide server market increased 19.9% year over year to $17.0 billion in 3Q17.

Top 5 Companies, Worldwide Server Vendor Revenue, Market Share, and Growth, Third Quarter of 2017 (Revenues are in Millions)

Company

3Q17 Revenue

3Q17 Market Share

3Q16 Revenue

3Q16 Market Share

3Q17/3Q16 Revenue Growth

1. HPE / New H3C Group

$3,317.4

19.5%

$3,355.4

23.7%

-1.1%

2. Dell Inc

$3,070.4

18.1%

$2,226.7

15.7%

37.9%

3. IBM

$1,093.7

6.4%

$864.4

6.1%

26.5%

3. Cisco

$992.5

5.8%

$928.0

6.6%

6.9%

5. Lenovo

$861.2

5.1%

$985.0

7.0%

-12.6%

ODM Direct

$4,118.7

24.3%

$2,834.5

20.0%

45.3%

Others

$3,528.7

20.8%

$2,965.5

20.9%

19.0%

Total

$16,982.6

100.0%

$14,159.5

100.0%

19.9%

IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, November 2017

It is good to see this growth is shared by major geographies. IDC breaks down the growth rate as follows:

Server shipment revenue growth (yoy)

·Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan and China) +30.6%

·China +23.9%

·Japan +8.5%

·U.S. +19.7%

·EMEA + 19.5%

·Canada +14.5%

·Latin America +2.4%.

Servers require switches, so it is not surprising to see this market segment growing in step with the server shipments.Dell’Oro Group recently reported that Ethernet Switch – Layer 2+3 market revenue reached an all-time record in 3Q17, posting the highest year-over-year growth in five years. The positive results were driven by both campus switching and data centre switching. Cisco did will with its new Catalyst 9K switches and Intent-based networking paradigm. Arista did exceptionally well as evidenced by its most current quarterly financial report and despite the ongoing legal battle with Cisco.“We are starting to see signs for recovery in the Campus Switching market,” said Sameh Boujelbene, Senior Director at Dell’Oro Group. “Softness in campus switching has been weighing on the Ethernet Switch market over the past two years. It has been outweighing strength in Data Center switching until now as Cisco and HPE captured most of the growth in North American and European campus switching markets during the quarter, while Chinese market remained dominated by Huawei and H3C,” stated Boujelbene.IDC also reported a strong Q3 for the worldwide Ethernet switch market (Layer 2/3). The IDC figures show $6.75 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2017 (3Q17), an increase of 7.4% year over year.

Sunday, January 14, 2018

MTN is testing 5G at its labs in South Africa in conjunction with Ericsson.

The trial has achieved a throughput of more than 20Gbps with less than 5ms latency, which is the highest achieved on a mobile network in Africa.

The 5G trial is based on 5G prototype radios and commercially available baseband hardware, and 5G mobility is supported. The company are also collaborating on 5G use cases, including for the digital transformation of industries such as mining, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, and utilities.

Babak Fouladi, CTIO, MTN Group, says: “In collaboration with Ericsson we are continuously pushing the boundaries of how 5G can meet the diverse needs of our customers. 5G gives us the opportunity to rethink how our business can add further value to the lives of our customers.”

Researchers at MIT have observed a new topological phenomena in photonic crystals that could open up some new realms of basic physics research, according to the university. A paper on the topic has been published in the journal Science.

Whereas previous research has focused on closed, Hermitian systems, this research examines open system where energy or material can enter or be emitted. One of the observed effects in the photonic crystal is an unusual kind of changing polarization of light waves.

DENSO, one of the world’s largest automotive suppliers, has a significant seed investment in ActiveScaler, a start-up based in Milpitas, California that is developing Managed MaaS (Mobility-as-a-Service) systems powered by artificial intelligence. Financial terms were not disclosed.

"DENSO’s focus is to develop technologies that advance the future of mobility, and enable connected and automated driving," said Yoshifumi Kato, Senior Executive Director at DENSO Corporation. "These technologies directly influence the development of MaaS systems, which will disrupt the future of urban mobility for people and goods by making transportation solutions more seamless and accessible."

"We want to be the engine behind the future of MaaS – hence the term “Managed MaaS”, which will transform current fleet businesses to provide next generation mobility services," said Abhay Jain, CEO of ActiveScaler. "Traditional fleet management services and systems are quickly becoming obsolete because of issues like high upfront software and hardware costs, poor ecosystem integration, and lack of flexibility, which are limiting the type and quality of services that can be offered.

Baidu has launched a Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) that provides the underlying cluster facilities and root of trust on its global cloud platform. The company says that it developed the open platform in-house and that it is targetting applications such as digital currency, payment records, insurance transactions, etc.
A similar BaaS offering was rolled out by Tencent last year. It is believed that Alibaba will launch its own blockchain service as well.

“We already offer our customers Australia’s largest and fastest mobile network and with our IoT Network now we have added the ability to support millions of new devices like sensors, trackers and alarms operating at very low data rates that can sit inside machines and vehicles, reach deep inside buildings and have a battery life of years rather than hours and days,” said Ms Denholm.*

“This new capability has been delivered as part of our Networks for the Future program, which is a key pillar in the up to $3 billion capital investment Telstra is making over and above business as usual to transform the way we serve customers, digitise our operations, meet the growing demand for data and lay the groundwork for 5G and IoT," she added.

Qualcomm extended the offering period of its previously announced cash tender offer to purchase all of the outstanding common shares of NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ: NXPI).

The tender offer is now scheduled to expire at 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on February 9, 2018, unless extended or earlier terminated, in either case pursuant to the terms of the Purchase Agreement.

American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, the depositary for the tender offer, has advised Qualcomm that as of January 11, 2018, 5,695,728 NXP common shares, representing approximately 1.7% of the outstanding NXP common shares, have been validly tendered pursuant to the tender offer and not properly withdrawn. Shareholders who have already tendered their common shares of NXP do not have to re-tender their shares or take any other action as a result of the extension of the expiration date of the tender offer.

Qualcomm agreed to acquire all of the issued and outstanding shares of NXP for $110.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $47 billion. The deal will be financed through cash on hand and $11 billion in new debt. The companies expect total annualized synergies of $500 million within two years of close.

NXP Semiconductors N.V., which headquartered in Eindhoven, Netherlands, employs approximately 45,000 people in more than 35 countries and is known for its mixed-signal semiconductor electronics. The company was known as Philips Semiconductor prior to 2006.

For Q3 2016, NXP reported revenue of $2.469 billion, up 4.4% over a year ago, and GAAP gross profit of $1.184 billion, up 7.7% over a year ago.

The combined company is expected to have annual revenues of more than $30 billion, serviceable addressable markets of $138 billion in 2020 and leadership positions across mobile, automotive, IoT, security, RF and networking.